Stanley H. White Lecture: John Beardsley
Trained as an art historian, John Beardsley is a leading thinker and writer about historical and contemporary land-based art and landscape design. He is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous important books, including Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (1984; fourth edition, 2006), Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (1995), and monographs about designers and artists Ken Smith, Mario Schjetnan, Maya Lin, and Andy Goldsworthy.
Beardsley has held teaching appointments in the departments of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). He has also served as a full-time curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, both in Washington, DC, and as a guest curator for highly regarded exhibitions such as “Hispanic Art in the United States” (Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1987), “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” (Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002), and “Human Nature: Art and Landscape in Charleston and the Low Country” (Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, South Carolina, 1997). His exhibition “Dirty Work: Transforming the Landscape of Nonformal Cities in the Americas” (Harvard GSD, 2008) examined efforts to improve environmental conditions in low-income communities across Latin America.
From 2008 to 2019, Beardsley was Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC, where he oversaw a series of installations of contemporary art in the institution’s historic gardens as well as a new Mellon-funded initiative in urban landscape studies.
Beardsley earned an AB in Fine Arts from Harvard and a PhD in Art History from the University of Virginia.
This lecture will take place in person at 134 Temple Buell Hall (Plym Auditorium), 611 E. Lorado Taft Dr., Champaign, IL.
It will also be livestreamed on Zoom. To access the Zoom platform, please register.
For more information about this and other events in our spring 2022 series, please contact Prof. Conor O’Shea.